To analyze the status quo of hospital-community-family nursing model in China, and provide reference for nursing staff to carry out relevant research.

The literatures concerning hospital-community-family nursing intervention in China included in databases such as CNKI, Wanfang, VIP and SinoMed since they were created until June 2016 were retrieved and analyzed using bibliometrics and content analysis.

Totally 56 literatures were found up to standard. The first one was published in 2005, and the number of such literatures began to increase since 2012. Only 35.7% of them were published in core journals of nursing. Fund programs and literatures were consistently distributed, mainly from the eastern part of China. These literatures focused on patients with chronic diseases and those receiving maintenance treatment, most of which had no specific description of experiment randomization, sample size, intervention time, ethical issues and reliability and validity of research tools. There was a lack of assessment and training for multidisciplinary teams. Follow-up measures were single, mainly to develop discharge plans, telephone follow-up and family follow-up.

The application of the hospital-community-family nursing model in China is still in the middle of exploration. High-quality literatures, multidisciplinary team training and assessment systems, unified management of patient information, smart phone APPs as well as team rewards are badly needed to improve the quality of continued nursing.

Hospital-community-family; Nursing model; Literature review